[nickpsecurity]

"As the article you linked clearly states the data is anonymized and cannot be tied to individuals."

You should never believe that for two reasons:

1. Companies often get away with lying about that.

2. De-anonymization techniques, esp if having multiple sources of data to cross-compare, are improving every year thanks to an active, research community.

Most incentives work against your privacy. Most companies act on incentives. Best to just not share your data if you're concerned about where it might end up.

[StudentStuff]

With regard to #2, I covered in my comment to the poster your replying to that correlating partial names and the store location with registered voters from your state's freely available voter registry would de-anonymize most transactions in the dataset.

Nevermind that Google has location data for Android users (and Google Maps data on Android), and better profiles of people than the voter database has. Their attempts at user de-anonymization will likely be even more accurate.